Where No Dream is Too Big
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'Where No Dream is Too Big' October 28, 2000
By BEN DOBBIN/Associated Press Writer
CORNING, N.Y. -- John Filhaber has thrived in America's
high-tech hot spots and he's also familiar with the middle
of nowhere -- he spent a year working with a giant
telescope on a mountaintop in Chile.
Still, the 37-year-old optical engineer could hardly have
imagined landing his career in a small town ringed by
wooded hills, dairy farms and one-stop villages in
southwestern New York.
"I was shocked there'd be anything interesting at all for
me to do here," he said. Few rural settings can boast high-
flying innovators like Corning Inc.
Long recognized as a top-notch glassmaker, the 149-year-old
company is now a major player in the optical-networking
industry, an anchor of the telecommunications revolution.
At its Sullivan Park research hub on the town's outskirts,
the ranks of scientists, engineers and technicians
experimenting with signal-carrying light have doubled to
1,400 in just three years.
The company has ties to Greater Lowell as well. In
September, it announced it would build a photonic
components manufacturing facility on a 56-acre site in
Nashua, N.H. Construction is expected to begin next month,
with 850 people employed there by summer 2002.
And, earlier this month, Corning announced it would team up
with Chelmsford-based Sycamore Networks to accelerate
development of optical switching technologies. Last week,
Sycamore announced plans to build a 3,000-employee facility
in Tyngsboro.
"If it's not about light -- jamming as much information
down an optical fiber as possible -- I'm not interested,"
Filhaber said, relaxing between weekend repair jobs at his
hillside Victorian home after a trip to a Corning
laboratory in Garden Grove, Calif.
Entwining glass and specialty materials in some of the 20th
century's most potent technologies -- light bulbs,
telescope mirrors, color television tubes -- has always
been Corning's forte.
Its swift passage into the New Economy has proved every bit
as portentous.
Think DNA chips: A vital tool of genome research, the
specialized glass slides are used by biotechnology
researchers to analyze thousands of genes simultaneously.
Think flat-screen computer monitors.
Or perhaps Corning's greatest invention of all, the
gossamer threads of ultra-pure glass first spun into light-
carrying conduits in 1970 that now give backbone to the
Internet.
Already the world's leading producer of optical fiber,
Corning has gone on a yearlong, $10 billion shopping spree
to extend its reach in companion technologies like lasers
and optical switches that enable the transmission of
massive data volume at hyper-speed.
The Holy Grail: a telecom network that uses glass and light
from end to end -- replacing copper and electricity except
in the so-called last mile. Since 1996, fiber-optic systems
have spurred a 20-fold increase in data-carrying capacity.
Corning believes the volume of data on the Internet will
multiply 17-fold over the next three years.
Like its competitors, it is working to boost the throughput
rate -- to make transmission more reliable and energy-
efficient. Optical switches promise to allow data to be
routed almost exclusively via laser light -- virtually
eliminating the electronics required by most of today's
switches.
Corning's potential exploded into view in July, when its
exploratory talks with Canada's Nortel Networks on an
optical-components merger dissolved. Valued in excess of
$100 billion, that failed union would have been the second
biggest merger in technology history.
The company's acquisitions, which added 16,000 employees,
culminated with a $3.6 billion buyout of Pirelli's fiber-
optic unit in Italy last month and planted Corning fourth
behind Nortel, Lucent Technologies and JDS Uniphase in the
optical components field. The Big Three's annual sales in
that area range between $2.5 billion and $1.5 billion,
compared to some $1 billion for Corning, according to RHK
Inc., a California telecommunications research company.
"We've always been risk takers -- there's just more zeros
connected to our numbers now," said chief executive Roger
Ackerman. "I tell people we've caught a big wave. To stay
on it, we're just going to have to keep innovating."
This year, Corning began selling optical switches designed
to replace the more costly electronic switches that route
calls between continental fiber grids and slower regional
phone networks.
As the Corning zooms along the fast lane -- it anticipates
$7 billion in sales this year, up from $4.7 billion in
1999 -- the company town of 12,000 gets whipped right
along. In bad times, it looks more sophisticated than most
towns its size; in good times, the place sparkles.
Stroll down the main shopping thoroughfare, five gentrified
blocks crammed with craft shops and upscale boutiques.
Count the BMWs in the parking lots or $300,000 homes in the
hills. Meet rank-and-file retirees who've become millionaires
as Corning stock rocketed above $300 this fall from $23 in
August 1998.
The company has been shaping its eponymous community ever
since Amory Houghton Sr. transplanted Brooklyn Flint Glass
to the sleepy Chemung Valley. It spends 1 percent of
profits on its home region each year to help bankroll
schools, galleries and community groups, entice other
businesses to put down roots, even build a hotel.
It hauled the famed Watkins Glen racetrack out of bankruptcy.
It kept the Corning Classic on the women's pro golf
circuit. It remodeled the Corning Museum of Glass, founded
in 1951, into a jaw-dropping jewel expected to draw 650,000
visitors a year by 2003.
The aim is simple -- attract a skilled labor force to these
northern reaches of the Appalachians marked by their share
of dying farms and distressingly poor communities.
"It's enlightened philanthropy. You need to create an
environment where your people are happy," said David
Szczerbacki, dean of the business school at Alfred
University, which feeds nearby Corning with doctoral
graduates in ceramics, engineering and materials science.
Corning's leap into the telecom market coincided in 1998
with the sale of its consumer housewares business, maker of
Pyrex casserole dishes since 1915. But its legacy as a
research haven reaches back to 1908, and that lured B. Roe
Hemenway here last year just like it did George Beall in 1962.
"It's tough to retire when things are pretty exciting,"
said Beall, 64, a Canadian whose 82 patents have found use
in everything from smooth stovetops to spacecraft insulation.
Booming business has raised housing prices considerably,
and this month the local country club, faced with a long
waiting list, doubled its initiation fee to $5,000.
The usual grumbles about small-town life -- too few fine
restaurants, not enough activities for singles, little
ethnic diversity -- have a refreshing counterbalance:
Commuting to work takes five minutes, nature's lushness is
a glance away, and sideshows like the Finger Lakes wine
country are just over the hill.
Hemenway, 40, an optical-networking researcher who last
worked for a California startup, has been dazzled by
Corning's transformation "from a company that was very
conservative, one step at a time, to one where quite simply
no dream is too big."
"An extraordinary job" was Filhaber's motivation for moving
here in 1998, but the surroundings have him hooked.
"You gravitate to a place like this -- good schools, fresh
air, low-cost housing," marveled Filhaber, who grew up in
rural Connecticut.
Filhaber clocks out at 5 p.m. to spend time with his two
young sons. But once they're tucked in bed, the unabashed
workaholic often ends up back in his lab until past
midnight.
His liquid-crystal development group helped create an
optical switch "that's the hottest photonic product out
there in my own opinion, and we've got some follow-ons that
are really going to set the world on its ear. ... Then
there's the day-after-tomorrow stuff, things the customer
doesn't even know he needs yet."
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